Books: Heard Any Good Books Lately?

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"You could drive from here to California on a Dickens," claims Jeanne Sullivan, a librarian in Oak Park, Ill. The point is well taken; the library's copy of David Copperfield is 22 cassettes long. Says Birmingham Photographer Mike Clemmer: "I haven't made any long car trips, but when I do, I'll buy a book on tape. No more lousy radio music or CB chatter for me." Lynn Kirk, a real estate investor from Ojai, Calif., admits, "I am definitely addicted to books on tape. I cannot get into my car without them. There are no commercials, you can listen to whatever you want, and it offers a little self-improvement." And Chuck Russell, an Atlanta management consultant, testifies, "I've heard so many books that I would never have read otherwise. One of them was War and Peace: about 50 tapes. It took two months, but it was worth it."

"Tell me a story" used to be the plea of childhood. It is rapidly becoming the demand of adults. In bookstores across the U.S., literature is assuming a different shape. In addition to traditional clothbound editions and paperbacks, books now lie coiled in little boxes, ready to unspool and speak to anyone with $7.95 and a tape player.

The list of recorded volumes, now some 12,000 titles long, is as wide as a library. Some are only one tape: about an hour and a half. Others can go on for days. Listeners can wander from Hamlet and Moby Dick to Tough Marriage and Eat to Succeed. Although fiction is the most beguiling, self-help books are in greatest demand: The One Minute Manager, In Search of Excellence, 21 Days to Stop Smoking. On occasion, more calorific titles come into earshot: Totally Lewd Limericks, How to Make Love to a Man (prefaced by the warning "This tape contains explicit and graphic language which may be considered offensive"). The voices on the talking books may be stars, such as Michael York (Anna Karenina), Michael Learned (The Scarlet Letter) and Jason Robards (Anatomy of an Illness), or such authors as Ann Beattie, John Updike and Eudora Welty, reading from their own works. Even Lee Iacocca, Rosalynn Carter and Mike Wallace have recently gone from the word processor to the microphone. It is as ^ if, after decades of attention to the eye in TV, films and videocassettes, the ear has been rediscovered.

"No question about it," says Valeri Cade, president of the audio-and- video publishing division of Simon & Schuster, "there is a big future for books on tape. We've doubled the number of accounts every six months, when we come out with a new list." Agrees Mitchell Deutsch, president of Warner Audio Publishing: "There is a mass market out there. I'm predicting that we will see a 50% to 100% growth in the next five years. It is a fabulous, exciting new development in publishing."